Wholeheartedly agree with everything you say here, @Mark_Anthony. Heavy Reading found there were more than three dozen standards around virtualization. Service providers today say every NFV implementation is custom; there are best practices, but even when they work within a vendor's interop ecosystem, customers obviously have many vendors' products already installed - and they want to (and will) continue using them. There are no rip and replaces! So the time to design, implement and install NFV must be cut dramatically in order for CSPs to recoup their investments via services on demand, managed security, IoT, etc.

Enterprises typically want to work with fewer partners. Managing these relationships is expensive and time-consuming. Of course, they also demand openness. Operators are well-positioned to deliver a slew of services, eliminating other vendors for enterprises to oversee, while continuing to avoid vendor lock-in. Agility and scalability are, as you say @Mark, vital - that's one of the whole points of moving to cloud and virtualization!

carriers and mso's can potentially double revs on nfv features. Currently the revenues for security services (firewalls, deep packet inspection, web browser security, RT security, anti virus) is going to security vendors. nfv will be a paradigm shift for the providers where every new feature is a rev oppurtunity. Features will come quickly as opposed to years in the old model. There is also the features of data managment - streaming priority and RT priority aka qos and service agreements.

The tech hurdles/standards of SDN/NFV need to be ironed out quickly - it's sad that OTT like wechat and whatsup can take off en masse while the carriers seemingly are spectators. Imagine if csp's can head-end these OTT services to combine with managed RT streams - another $ generator. nfv is all that.